In the summer of 2008 Equality Designs took on the the project of creating a community Web site. The concept was to create a skimboarding Web site. Bring skimboarders together in the Pacific northwest and hopefully expand the Web site to a larger audience. The domain name Skimboardculture.com was purchased and the concept started to come alive.
We first went out and took photos locally in Bellingham and gathered photos from past trips all the way back to 1999 from local riders. We created the logo, icons, design for the site based off the photos.
Once we had some artwork together we created a basic magazine Web design. Lots of white space and a simple and a low-image design to ensure the site loaded quickly for the amount of content and scripts that would be loading on the Web site was key.
We then installed blog, forum and a photo gallery software and redesigned each product to fit into the general design of the Web site. After that we just started loading content that was written ahead of time to fill the site. Last the RSS feed for each product (blog, photos, forum) were pulled into the home page.
The physical Web site was finished, but that is the easy part. Without users the Web site wouldn’t really function. As the content was created and posted to the Web site we linked up the RSS feeds to Twitter accounts and started reposting content on the Skimboarding Facebook fan page.
Traffic started spiking as the social networking community started to take notice. At that point we used those tools to send Q&As to prominent skimboarders and reposted them on the Web site.
The site was handed off to the staff who we worked with to create the Web site. The Web site updated at least three times a week and there is an active forum, which has helped the traffic increase monthy.
The Web site has released in July of 2008. That month the site got a total of 2,274. A year later the site is averaging 101,664 a month.
Combining social networking tools with custom features, so people can actively submit and post content will help your Web site grow. Skimboard Culture is now self sufficent and makes back Web hosting fees with Google Ads and advertisements.
Project complete.
